This is how top managers manage their time

Editor's note: How do successful managers explore work strategies, methods and means that suit them, and then develop a personal efficiency path on top of them? The "personal high-efficiency period" and "the art of flexible time management" proposed in this paper are the experiences of successful managers. They are not only practical, but also provide us with a new perspective for thinking about time management, which is worth learning from.

A manager once said to me, "You know, we were never trained in working methods at the time. We always had so much stuff on our desks that we couldn't breathe. ."

I do know this, but the question that comes with it is: Are CEOs often overwhelmed by work? How exactly do they organize the time and tasks of the day carefully? What does a well-organized day at the top look like? What implications do they have for the work of managers and professionals at all levels?

Below we'll see how these top managers find their own useful path to excellence.

Top managers' time-switching strategies

If you were to ask some average manager what a well-organized day should look like in their minds, most would probably answer, "I think it should be Control the time much more tightly than it is now, at 9:00, I am casual; at 10:00, I still can't make up my mind." Or: "I think I should close the door and concentrate on my work. It's all done."

Most people think that a well-organized, productive day is achieved through tight control, and they think the CEO must do the same. But what amazes me the most is that the number one premise of a CEO's organization is a highly flexible schedule. What they focus on is not to control their time, but to focus on the things that should be done, across the infinite variables of the day.

How to take advantage of personal productivity periods

Is there an optimal time of day that you can call your productivity periods? The answer is of course yes. Most people are most awake in the morning, and some are best in the afternoon. The purpose of discussing this is to allocate those most challenging tasks to the hours when you are most competent.

Take advantage of the quiet time in the early morning and late at night. Some people still believe in the words of 18th century thinker Matthew Henry: "Those who do great things get up early."

Disney boss Robert Egger (Robert A. Iger), wakes up at 4:45 every day, goes to the gym, enters the office at 6:00 to read various materials, and holds the first meeting of the day until 7:00. "I think people have their own circadian rhythms," he said, "but for me, the morning is the peak time, when it's a little more calm."

Howard Rubinstein every morning before 4:30 a.m. He came to the study at home to quickly browse the TV news, and then began to process the documents he brought home with different colors, determine the call to return, sign the check, and determine the agenda for the day. After this is over, he will Stretch out and stretch out, then go for a run.

Announcer and "The Hateful" Don Imus always wakes up at 4:17 and starts "figuring out how to annoy people to death."

Vice Chairman of the Board of Directors of The Estée Lauder Companies Inc. in New York City Jeanette Wagner likes to schedule some routines like signing letters, writing checks, etc. to be done at the end of the day and when she is tired. "On the other hand, if I'm really trying to solve an important problem, whether it's a complex personnel issue, or something like thinking about how to run a middle management meeting well, I'll choose the weekend," Wagner said. Dedicated personal time or quiet time early in the morning to deal with. Sometimes 3:00 late at night can be a very creative time.” “I don’t sleep too long,” Wagner continued, “I often wake up in the middle of the night. Come over here, take out a scratch pad and jot down ideas that you think are important... Sometimes I'm even able to solve a problem that was difficult to solve before or draw up an outline of a complete project proposal that was difficult to come up with before. "

Waking up at 5:00 in the morning may be beyond the imagination of many. But if you normally wake up at 6:30, you can gradually start half an hour earlier, and then an hour earlier. Many people find that cutting off some sleep time is not so terrible through this method, and the benefits obtained from it. , such as getting more work done, the rhythm of work throughout the day can thus be relieved, etc., but it is huge and long-lasting.

Using quiet time on the road Another quiet time outside the office is on the way to and from get off work. The reason many managers are able to ask for efficiency in travel time is that they have a dedicated driver to pick them up and go to get off work. You can use the following two methods to achieve this effect.

1. Use public transportation. Mary Barnby once said: "I work very efficiently in the morning, I always take a stack of papers to work on when I get on the subway, and I spend an hour and 20 minutes on the road, which is a really good opportunity.

Whenever I leave Manhattan early in the morning to go to the airport, I think of the worst time-wasting thing I can think of is sitting stuck on the other side of the highway leading to Manhattan to Long Island (dubbed by locals as "the world" Longest Parking Lot") bored waiting in a motionless car. I asked myself, why would they rather be there honking their horns and endure such annoyance and a huge waste of time than riding the subway and making good use of their time on the road? I really can't figure it out.

In fact, many commuters have two options, subway and bus, in addition to private cars. Just imagine, the freedom and comfort you sacrifice without taking a private car is worth the efficiency you gain by taking advantage of the quiet and undisturbed time on the road by taking the subway?

2. Take advantage of the time saved by rational car use. If many commuters in the same area could get together, they would probably also adopt the “basket-on-the-base” practice that is now popular in Washington, D.C. There, commuters who don't know each other take someone else's private car at a predetermined stop to quickly enter the city via the express lane dedicated to multi-passenger vehicles. The most important thing is that the "receiving" car must be quiet, no music, no chat, no cell phone interruption, you can work, think, read, or rest in it.

5 Tips for Finding Quiet Time at Work These tips include: 1. Retire. If you have the freedom to come and go, if you're not at your desk, and your manager won't ask "Where's Gary?", you can retire into an empty conference room, or get up and walk around the office area Take a walk in the cubicle, or take some reading to the coffee shop.

Every day, a General Foods department manager sneaks into an empty frosted-glass office next door so he can think about problems uninterrupted.

A lawyer in New York would turn around and take another elevator downstairs to Starbucks coffee every day after greeting colleagues at work for an hour.

2. Consult with your boss to buy yourself a quiet time. If simply retiring doesn't work, you can discuss with your boss to secure some quiet time for yourself. From your boss's perspective, this has the advantage of allowing you to focus on things that he or she considers important.

Mandatory group breaks are often of little use, and too many unexpected things can take the entire team completely out of their mission.

3. Use WordPad. With the door closed, people can still come to you. Many companies have an open door policy, and people frown at closed doors. But for Niekelodeon, the manager of one of the most avant-garde children's TV stations, on and off can get people to come to him, who has installed a clipboard and stylus on his door. When his door closed, anyone who wanted to see him simply wrote a reminder message on a clipboard. The reason why this method works is that as soon as he appears in front of the writing board, he will immediately follow the map to find those people, so that everyone knows that they can find him without directly breaking into his office.

But then again, be extremely cautious when approaching people who leave messages for you, this is the only way to make your "escaping time" benefit both yourself and your colleagues . Tip: What if your colleague doesn't have a writing pad on the door that your colleague closes? A yellow post-it note can be placed above the doorknob so visitors can use it to conveniently write a message and stick it on the door.

4. Set up a non-interference period. If you are the leader of the group, you can ask colleagues to give you an uninterrupted time, a lawyer mentioned in my early book, The Organized Manager, told him the firm's Colleagues:

5. Stagger peak hours. Leave the office an hour before lunch starts, and if you arrive early, like 11:30, many restaurants will allow you to sit in or do some work early.

Are you reluctant to fight for productive time yourself? Many people are indeed reluctant to do this even if there is no hindrance or difficulty, and some have even told me that they feel guilty for not being able to find themselves with clients and colleagues during that time.

If you also have such concerns, you can use the following two questions to confirm your real situation: 1. If you were your own colleague or client, would you occupy your own full attention? Your attention to someone and something will only be guaranteed if your important time is guaranteed. Who hasn't experienced the hardships and sufferings of people who don't have a little time for themselves?

2. When you are in a meeting, customers and colleagues can't find you. If you regard your personal time as you are attending an important meeting, what should you think? You can even apply this idea to similar things at work.

How Top Managers Organize Changing Work Hours—Basic Work Points Checking Plan

“Every day before I start work, I play a simulation planning game, imagining what I should do, and suddenly unexpected things happen. Meetings or emergencies, doors slamming open, etc., through this game, I try to find ways to better control my time."

Almost everyone is overwhelmed by the lightning speed of communication right now. Breathless, a relationship manager in the financial industry once told me, "The worst thing is that whenever I'm about to deal with a lot of stuff at hand, I'm getting calls from clients. The phone calls, and the emails came in, and I was so distracted. At the end of the day, when I was about to get off work, the things on my desk were still piling up. That's it, great plan, the best Intentions are all gone in one fell swoop."

But if you accept the interaction as a reality, instead of expecting it to leave you entirely, you may instead master it, tame it, find a way to live with it, and Which maintain a good working attitude. Below are 3 great plans for creating order and increasing efficiency during an unsettled workday.

Spot Checking How do you organize your changing schedule? To most of us, organization seems to be about control, but for many top managers, organizing time no longer means assigning clear time to accomplish specific work tasks outside of their own priorities. Meaning unlimited flexible schedules with few fixed boxes.

On a flexible schedule, just make sure that some of the requirements for at least one day are met.

There are generally three types of basic work points that must be checked, namely function-based work requirements, content-based work requirements, and comprehensive requirements for both. For example:

1. Functional-based job requirements:

·Are the timing of priorities guaranteed

·Make and return calls > · Continue to focus on work done

· Two hours spent on non-priority (can be scattered throughout the day)

· MBWA

· Schedule daily brief interviews with each direct reporter

·Scheduled a thorough interview with the boss every day

2. Content-based job requirements. The basic requirements in terms of content generally include the following situations:

·Contact with old customers

·Develop new customers

·Data processing

·Authorization and employee training

·Writing memos and letters , reports, marketing plans, strategic plans, etc.

Any other legitimate matters can be counted as comprehensive basic check points, don't let it go. Be careful not to overload yourself, be quick, and with these checkpoints as scaffolding, here's what you need to learn about the unique art of work that top managers demand, the art of being able to arrange themselves flexibly The root cause of working hours.

Restructuring Time - Using the "Secret 10 Minutes"

All top managers know well of the endless haggling between their personal time needs and the institutionalized, stylized group office model , is an unavoidable reality, and this is the really important time management art that makes top managers become top managers. One of the main challenges is that you have the habit of adapting your focus to a specific job at any time so that it can fit into smaller units of work time.

Think of a workday full of bargains as a patchwork of small time units of 10 to 10 minutes. I call these small units "drizzle", "mosaic" time blocks, "a few bytes of time", etc., to keep in your mind the image memory of using this 10-minute fragmentary time.

You can use the virtual scenarios below to compare how much the difference between having and without the concept of "drizzle" can make a difference to your work.

You hear Marvin coming down the hallway, and you know that in about 3 minutes, he'll stick his head in through the door and say, "Hey, do you have time?" The numbers are on the budget report, and you've worked on it for 10 minutes, with an estimated 20 minutes to go. In this case, your two responses to Marvin's unexpected arrival are:

If your The goal is to get the job done now, so it's: "Ah, here we go again, can't do anything, what a mess!"

If you're thinking "drizzle," then it's: "Oh, it's alright, I'm 1/3 done. After Marvin is gone, I can get out another 1/3 before the 3pm meeting. Find a chance to slip away after the meeting and finish the remaining 1/3." < The point is that you are flexible and tactful about your timing. This has two advantages: first, because you welcome the uninvited guest and jump in immediately, the victim's anger is greatly reduced, and the energy "blocked" by this dissatisfaction can be released; second, if As you go back and check your daily checklist like a magnet, you are constantly looking for every possible opportunity to complete these basic tasks. Over time, you will develop a very good habit of using your time, and your work efficiency will also improve. It will greatly improve, and as far as I know, this is the success formula used by many senior managers and CEOs.

I don't know why this flexible time management strategy around a fixed flagpole (check the checklist) is so useful, but it actually works. Because as far as I know, all managers who try to climb to the top of the organization follow this path. Below is my first exposure to this strategy.

Joseph Vittoria, Chairman of the Board of Directors of ResortQuest International, Inc., when I visited him, had written down on a yellow note five things he wanted to made the call. But after he made a phone call, someone came in and asked about something, or asked him to discuss something with someone. In this case, our Vitalia always greeted everyone with a smile, and as soon as they left, he made a second call, and after the second call, he went to visit someone on the same floor. All in all, it looked like a whirlwind swirling around the ground. But whenever he escaped from the unexpected communication of the surprise attack, he immediately went back to his desk and made the rest of the phone calls. In this way, after a few hours passed, the phone call he originally planned to make was finally finished. Although the "lead" has not been broken, it has been completed.

Mr. Vitalia's day is a mixture of fixed and irregular hours, which is the way most senior business people think about time.

In John Corey, CEO of Gannett Newspapers, the same phenomenon was evident when he was dealing with paperwork. As we mentioned in Chapter 1, Corey prefers to personally review and process letters or other materials that are sent to the office, and as a result, he often has a mountain of documents in his hands. But he must finish them off. So the same scene reappeared. People came and went in the office, the phone kept ringing, and impromptu meetings were inevitable. Anyway, when the other things were over, he had to go back to the desk one by one. Handle high-paying documents well. All correspondence is processed from 8:30 in the morning, usually before lunch.

Neither Curley nor Vitalia would ever make the effort to define their time as "phone time" or "copy time." Instead, they "sprinkle" these things over a few hours and do it in an extremely time-efficient manner without feeling pressured at all.

Golden Words for Career Advancement—How to Master the Art of Flexible Time Management

To help you master a flexible work schedule, here are six time management techniques for you. But let's start with the story of Sandra Kresch, an independent consultant, former partner at Booz & Co., a consultant with a very good approach to her work, who describes a typical day of her own, It is full of professional and personal characteristics.

I have a series of things to do today. I want to take my cat to the veterinarian, and I want to go to the doctor myself; the office is also full of work; in addition, I also have to work for a non-profit for which I serve as president. For-profit seeks a new executive director; ends up helping out a group of friends.

When considering how to handle so many things, I think the most important thing is to have an all-day schedule. The only time a cat can go to the vet is at 7am. So I delivered it early and figured out how to take it home in the afternoon.

After that, I had to stay at home for a considerable amount of time. There are two businessmen, one in London and one in another, that I need to contact, so I have to call their office early in the morning so they can call me before I leave the house .

My work schedule in the office is always very tight, focusing strongly on the 3 major things that must be done this week, without any distractions.

From this busy professional's account of her day, we can distill 6 ways she maintains some control over time, I I recommend these 6 methods to readers.

1. Use a list of three or four major to-do items that must be completed this week. To remember it, say it several times a day. You can also paste this list on the work schedule planner, or enter it into the electronic schedule, so that you can check it repeatedly. This approach can help you focus on achieving your weekly work goals.

2. Mark the fixed point in the working day, that is, the daily work frame. To take the previous story, the cat had to be taken to the vet earlier so that it could be picked up the same day, and the call to London had better be done by noon, otherwise there would be an unexpected meeting conflict with other work tasks. Once the frame is set up, filling in specific content is much more comfortable and easier. In Hign Output Management, Andrew Grove says: "We have to find restrictive steps...if we can determine what is unchangeable, and If we can arrange other things that are 'easy to talk about' around these things, our work efficiency will be much higher."

3. Estimate the factors of "change". Pay attention to things that are limited or leave no room for anything. For example, preparing a memorandum for a 2:00 p.m. meeting that day is one thing that doesn't change much, but if it's next week's meeting, it might be a different story.

4. Lengthen the two ends of the workday. In the case of Kleich, we will notice that the appointment with the vet is at 7:00 in the morning. Similarly, we should also arrange personal and trivial matters in the workday. Both ends, like seeing your stylist at 7am, getting a haircut and shopping at 7pm.

5. Simplification and support. You should always ask yourself: What things in this job can be delegated to others? How can I make this work easier and easier?

6. For those endless demands, as Grove points out: "If you say yes to one thing, it's hard to say yes to another that takes you further from your goal. No."

——This article was authorized by Huazhang Branch of China Machinery Industry Press and excerpted from the book "Order to Success" by Stephanie Winston, published by the press in September 2005.

This is how top managers manage their time

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